Finally somebody wrote the post I’ve been waiting for. Like you I obsess over how i organize my RSS feeds and like you I feel stupid discussing the topic with people. Its just reading it shouldn’t be that complicated. Nevertheless I do it and Im gonna add your “Feed Preference” folder groupings which should be a time saver. I use Google Reader now (formerly used Blogbridge and Bloglines) and I mainly organize topically. I’ve spend an inordanant amount of time trying to find the best categories. So far I’ve reduced it to 9: 1. news/government 2. Science and technology 3. Health and Education 4. Economics 5. Media Dump (for stuff like updates to Digg del.icio.us and Youtube - not specific topic feeds) 6. Film, Television and Lit 7. Sports and Gaming 8. Music and design 9. Opinion. It’s tough to see my relationship to the blogs in my groupings and your system seems to help out in that. Like I’ll definately put my friends blogs ina seperate folder. Using your “Feed Preference” grouping and maybe a “media grouping” (Video, Photo etc). I should be well situated. thanks

I made a similar shift a couple of years ago, too -- though my response to my own taxonomic compulsions has been to go even further in the other direction. I have just four folders:

Daily: Self-explanatory. The feeds that I want to read individually every day.

New Subs: The folder where I drop any new subscriptions. I generally keep things in there for a few weeks to see whether I maintain an interest, and then move them into one of the other folders or unsubscribe.

Bulk: This is where most feeds go if I keep them after the "new subs" trial period. I tend to read the contents of the bulk folder in a "river of news" reverse-chronological style. I'll only occasionally go through and look at individual feeds.

Volume: Similar to bulk, but a place for the feeds that update really frequently (and would thus dominate the bulk folder if I put them in there).

The gotcha in my system, though, is that the two latter folders are really used as input for the "watches" that I have set up in FeedDemon (best feed reader ever): I have an ever-changing list of word/phrase searches set up (based on my interests at any given time), watching all the feeds I'm subscribed to. This pulls any items that may be of particular interest to me without my going through 500+ feeds individually.

I've basically shifted to a low-friction approach where I'm consuming the aggregate product rather than the individual feeds.

I just number them, 1-5. 1 is stuff from my friends all the way down to 5 which is downright frivolity. It’s worked much better than categories/labels/tags. It seems counter-intuitive - using a number system… but what can I say, it works. (43folders is a 2 - I used to miss it all the time until I started rating feeds).

Make use of any tagging capability in your feed reader and use that for grouping, whether it is a numbering system, actual categories, or secret codes for your weird fetishes. I tag with my own feed reader MonkeyChow. Sometimes you only have time for certain feeds, and this lets you keep up with what you really want to know.

I took your advice and moved my all of my 106 feeds into two categories: must read and non-essential. I already feel better about not reading all of the posts every day. Thank you thank you!

I just turned 30, and with that took the decision of what I wanted to be in life. Miraculously my rss-feeds followed suit. I subdivided as follows:

• communication and general news - where I subscribe to important stuff like mail, and feeds that offer important news. For the latter, that includes: NYTimes, BBC, HBS Knowledge.
• Then I subdivided into topics, relevant to my career-choice: e.g. marketing, logistics, commerce, howto, etc.
• And then the last two are friends (co-bloggers), and just-for-fun-blogs.

And then there’s another step. A la GTD, I try to make what I read actionable. Either I see something cool and blog about it, or I see something cool and I either bookmark it for my blog-readers to read (in the form of weekly links (which I also evaluate before posting)), or I print it out, read it, process it, and perhaps blog it. If I notice that after a few weeks I don’t ever read a specific feed, I either delete it or move it down the page and promote other more interesting ones.

To summarise, I took 3 steps: 1. formed a goal - what do I want to achieve? 2. subdivided my time into modules supporting that goal; and 3. evaluate by making items actionable.

Though I don’t want to jinx it for myself, this system has worked really well for a few months now. However, step 1 really is the hardest, and step 3 is no piece of cake either.

I subscribe to a couple of hundred feeds, and I often don't get to half of them. That's until I discovered Aide RSS (http://www.aiderss.com/). You can give them an OPML file, and they use some algorithm magic to filter your feeds in real time and serve you a new feed with the best, most popular stuff.

So, instead of not reading 30 marketing and PR blogs, I can read one feed that's a decent distillation of those blogs. It's not perfect, but it's probably a 75% solution.

I wrote basically the same post in May 2006:
http://www.ihol.org/blog/index.php/2006/05/31/surviving-aggregation-overload/

So I can tell you after two years of experience that this is an incredibly liberating way to organize your feeds! (Screenshot is bloglines but I've moved to Google Reader, too)

i agree whole heartedly about the google reader pile up causing agitation.

the thing that helped the most was when google switched to actual counts over a hundred. for a while everything over a hundred just said “hundreds” and working to get that number down with no real measure of how far i had to go caused me a lot of stress. now i can handle keeping things about a hundred - knowing at least how many there are. but i think i might try this system for a while.

You’re feeling stress about your RSS feeds? Talk about self-created problems. The real solution to managing RSS feeds is to stop reading RSS feeds. It’s simple.

Email difficulties I can understand. Email is the main source of information between myself and my students, my department chair, etc. If I stop reading my email, I’m not doing my job. But my RSS feeds? Not even close.

At best, RSS feeds provide “news”, most of which is the pap that media conglomerates use to sell advertising. I look back at my news-divorce earlier this year as one of the best productive moves I’ve made. I don’t read the newspaper, nor watch television, nor visit any dedicated news websites. I don’t even listen to the news in the car anymore (thanks to NPR podcasts that allow me to listen without hourly interruptions of “top stories”). No news = happier me. It’s like quitting smoking, but the benefits are all mental rather than physical.

All those feeds makes you happy? They give you pleasure? I hear the same is true of heroin. Heroin will kill you, and the other will cause you to erupt with glee when someone helps you “deal” with your problem more efficiently.

I do read a few RSS feeds. I have a couple of blogs I follow, or sites devoted to subjects I find interesting. I’m not opposed to the technology, which is good. But when a purely optional “convenience” technology is causing stress, it’s time to re-evaluate at a pretty fundamental level. Re-ordering might work for some folks, but the right answer might be rather to kill the feeds and start over. Start with fewer than ten and give it two weeks: I’ll bet you’ve lost no money, lost no opportunities, lost no life experiences and instead found a healthy heapful of real life.

Are you still labeling things Sports, etc. in addition to the uber categories you list?

I’ve used a somewhat similar system with iTunes Smart Playlists that I’ve been meaning to post about.

Thanks for the post,

a

Thanks for the ideas - it’s a tough problem, and one that’s near and dear. A few comments:

• If you want to get a handle on any information source, I think there are only three things you can do: Get fewer, Get faster, and Get control. For RSS: Subscribe only to the ones that matter (i.e., what Koch calls the vital few, not the trivial many) and cull mercilessly, get very efficient at processing them, and put the source in its place (e.g., don’t check it all the time). More about this from the email perspective in Got the email blues?
• To get fast, use a system. Mine is a GTD-like one - more at Afraid to click? How to efficiently process your RSS feeds. Here’s a benchmark: my average seems to be about 10-20 seconds/post - pretty good, I thought… Still a lot of work, though.
• Mark Hurst’s Bit Literacy has a nice chapter on going on a media diet. His model: Create a media portfolio with two main components: Lineup and Tryouts. Lineup: Those that’ve earned their place as your most valuable sources. (The three types: Stars, Scans, and Targets.) Candidate sources get into the lineup by going through a tryout phase. (Guidelines: Be discerning, be intentional, and be biased toward rejecting.)

The big problem (and this means big opportunity) is for the tool makers (Bloglines, Reader, etc.) to support quantitative measures of value, i.e., to help answer definitively the question “Which sources are most worth reading?” It’s really the only question that matters when there’s so much to read. There are two parts: Trusted recommendations (finding pre-filtered candidates - those worth trying out) and concrete evaluation (just mentioned). The former is a research problem, but collaborative filtering should provide a good start now. (If Gmail can use collaborative SPAM filtering, why can’t…)

The latter should be possible now - the tool would track percentage of a feed’s posts I “investigate,” down to one or two levels (expand body, click URL, etc.) As envisioned, I think this does go beyond Reader’s Trends feature. More at Information provenance - the missing link between attention, RSS feeds, and value-based filtering.

Just my 2c (OK, maybe 3c :-)

Personally, I should reduce my feeds to the “vital few” but I can’t stand not being connected thinking that I might miss a piece of information that I find to be extremely relevant. Simply turning down the fire hose of information doesn’t solve this problem. I work for Attensa, and we develop RSS readers for the enterprise. The value proposition here is that knowledge workers like myself, need a better way to sift through information overload. Organizing feeds into groups only spreads the problem into multiple folders. The Attensa RSS Readers are cool because they use predictive ranking to continuously observe and analyze user behavior as one processes the feeds. So now as I read my feeds the articles are displayed in a prioritized list based on the likelihood that they will be of interest to me. My personal reader is configured to show my “favorites” which are the feeds that I read most often and consistently. While I am still plugged into all of the feeds, I know that the most relevant ones will be brought to my attention.

This goes beyond the “trend features” and includes the time and frequency that feeds are accessed and articles read, deleted and ignored.

Best, from the Attensa Team.

I love how the comments here often are as valuable and interesting as the posts themsevles, a lot of good advice here!

My groups are similar to wood.tang’s above, but they’re filtered more by author/publisher than by personal importance (a subtle distinction, to be sure, but important nonetheless).

Private: Twitter, blog comment feeds, and other things in which I participate directly.

Wife: My wife is a writer, and she has 3 blogs and writes for 2 websites. Her feeds are all in here.

Friends: Feeds of people I know in real life (and who aren’t my wife).

People: People I don’t know in real life, but who publish great single-author blogs. John Gruber, Andy Ihnatko (I have a scraper feeding me his CST column as well), and Stephen Fry are among those in here.

Content: Online material I read for the content, not the author. Indexed and Ars Technica can be found in this one.

News: High-volume feeds that I’ll only read a few articles from, but I like to see all the headlines. Yahoo! Top Stories and Slashdot.

Then I sometimes have a couple of feeds that aren’t in folders. These are things I’ve just recently started following, and I’m deciding whether to move them into a more permanent location or scrap them entirely. Currently (including 11 that are either Private or on probation) I’m only following 35 feeds, and I still feel like I’ve got my finger on the pulse of everything I want to know.

One other category I have in my Bloglines feed reader is “testing” or “trial.” I find that I’m “testing” a lot of feeds and I don’t want the “trial” feeds grouped in with my “active” feeds. Because once a feed makes it into my active folders and my “process.” It’s much harder to get rid of the feed.

Also, since the launch of Bloglines Beta (http://beta.bloglines.com) over the summer, I find myself very systematically rearranging my feed library to limit the feeds I have in my “active” folder. I’ve become more ruthless in allowing feeds to remain in my top 10.

I was surprised no one mentioned Netvibes. I have an account, with tabs of like minded feeds. I have netvibes set up to only load the feeds that I go t - this prevents a constant thrash. I also like the box view to scan the headlines. I am not sure how I would use RSS without netvibes